with a prepaid card. good morning from new york. i'm chris hayes. four people were shot in a mardi gras celebration in new orleans french quarter last night. one is in critical condition. three are in stable condition. and a new leader took over in afghanistan. right now, my story of the week, how america kills. over the last 17 months that we've been on air, we've talked quite a bit about the obama administration's secret program of targeted killing of suspected terrorists. a small number of those targeted and killed have been american citizens while some unconfirmed number of those killed in yelm,

pakistan and elsewhere have been innocent civilians, mothers, children, young and old men in the wrong place at the wrong time. they have implement add rigorous screening process at the white house deciding who ends up on the list. the president approaches the program with solemnity and care and the policy has been efficient and effective in decimating al qaeda and other terrorist groups. it's been said, quote, the enemy is really, really struggling. these atakes have produced the broadest, deepest, and most rapid reduction in al qaeda senior leadership that we've seen in several years. my partner michael isikoff outfound a memo that outlines why they believe they have the

legal thoort authority to use force. at thursday's confirmation hearings for his nomination to head up the cia, white house counterterrorism director raised questions about the memo and the programs it helps justify. >> your view seems to be that even if we could save american lives by containing more american terrorists by using traditional techniques it would be beer to kill them with a drone or let them go free than to detain them. could you explain that argument? >> is your testimony today that the huge increase in the numb beer of lethal strikes has no connection to the change in the obama administration's detention policy? >> do you believe that the president should provide an individual american with the

opportunity to surrender before killing them? >> no topic that we discuss regularly on the show invites quite the level of backlash on the social media as the kill list and drones. given the often disingenuous criticism the president has faced i can understand why dechl carats view it with cynicism suddenly expressed by conservatives this week, much of which has been forced on liberals' hypocrisy. i had to laugh myself when rue put murdoorurdoch tweeted the following. he meant, i think guantanamo. many viewers who have responded online have accused me of being naive or go out of my way to criticism the president or stoking controversy where there

is one. it is true, polls show it supports targeted killing. partly i think that dice to the fact the public hasn't been given much information about exactly how the information has come to the conclusion it can carry out these killings, even against citizens and partly because the worst effects of the policy, the collateral damage or more accurately, the children who are 1 years old who our weapons kill are almost entirely inviszable to us. many, perhaps even majority of democrats, even self-described liberals might support it for the same reason a blogger lou segal gave this week. he wrote, though this might sound like a cold war liberal defending cia-led cps and military interventions, i support president obama's drone

attacks. and i admit that i'm a hypocrite. if a republican administration were executing these practices i'd probably join in. but i trust this president's judgment that the drones are a allegedly mat way to take terrorists who would if they could kill thousands of americans, he's making a trald-off knowing that a successful massive terrorist attack against us would result in a far greater damage to our democratic institutions. would you rather we have boots on the ground like the iraq war? isn't this precisely the kind of change we were promised? this narrow choice between big swrie lens and smaller violence shows, i thing, just how fully we have all implicitly adochted the war on tar rohr, how much they continue to set the years of our thinking years after they've been displaced from office because that argument presupposed we are at war and must continue be at war until an

ill defined enemy is vanquished. what is the alternative to small wall. if the existence of people out in the world who arrively working to kill americans means we are still at war, then it seems to me we will be at war forever and we'll surrender control over whether that's the state we want to be in. we could be a nation that declares its war over and goes about rug russly, using diplomacy and police work to protect us from neuter attacks. the obama administration quite austen tash shusly presented it. even after the troops come home from afghan starngs we will still be a nation of wafrmt in 1832, carl wrote war is an act of force. it's freely operating and

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we're discussinging the laws on terrorists. right now. also a former counsel to the

assistant attorney general for national security in the obama justice department. jeremy, the author of "dirty wars." it debuted at the sundance film last month. he's a national security correspondent for the magazine. richard epstein. it ice great to have you here. i thought, jeremy, you've been reporting on this for a long time and you and i have had conversations on-on-this through your reporting. how the operators, implementing, this kill list, this program of targeted killing understand the legal regime they're operating within, right? i mean where does the authority flow from who ultimately is making shots and giving them assurances that what they're doing is legal? >> right. i mean there are two basic ways that these operations are

conducted. one is do it through the central intelligence agency and it could be a covert, a. but the bin laden raid was not carried out by cia operations. it was carried out by a special team, s.e.a.l. team 6. the other is the military can conduct clandestine operations which will eventually be owned by the president. the reason you have a covert action take place is if it goes wrong, the u.s. can deny it taking place. from my perception, there's a different said of understandings. he was working on the high-valued targeting program and i talked to him about the kill of the boy. >> he's a 16-year-old boy, son of anwar ail awlaki.

>> he said there's a reason i'm not doing this anymore. stanley mcchrystal who ran it and is often associated even though he's a social liberal, mcchrystal has come out and said this is a counterproductive policy because of the potential for blowback and the hatred that it inspires. you asked what sounds like a simple question but it has a complicated question. the story has broken out into the open and there's a discourse now that wasn't happening a week ago. >> i want to talk about how we should -- you know, that's internally how the law's understand and i think that the white house has been very clear about we're asserting this authority. we're signing off on this. the buck stops here.

what body of law is obtained here? what is the check list, how many hurdle dwrous have to jump over before you say there is a guy we're going to target for summary execution without trial? >> just to be clear, i did not work on this particular issue. >> and you probably couldn't be here if you had. >> exactly. and think this is one of the confusing and disturbing parts of the memo is that it refers to a bunch of different bodies of law and you talked at the beginning of the program about are we in a war. the memo asserts that it's acting that these authoritieses are pursuant to law of war authorities which provide one set of possible answers. it also makes a second air serks that these authorities are permissible under a self-defense framework that could exist've if we get to the point where the law -- where the war ends, the conflict with al qaeda ends. and to me that is a very potential

potentially. >> it sites the authority, military force that's passed. then there's also the broad principle of self-defense as an international law precept which is if some country's about to launch some horrific attack on you, you're allowed to defend yourself. that's just a general principle. and, richard, you argued basically that when we're in this terrain, we're almost by necessity in a land that is sort of lawless and just dependent on judgment, prudence, and care. >> well, i wish it were otherwise, but think in the end it was not. the way i approach the subjects. i think about how you think of self-defense. what happens is you start with a bold declaration of it, which is self-defense is always appropriate and then immediately you have to sort of hem it in with questions about good face.

and those are single actors. when you go to it, the information nation is weaker. you could try to ju dishlgize this in some particular sense but at that point you simply transfer the problem to somebody who doesn't have the responsibility and one of the serious dangers you run into is it givens deniability to the people who set up the situation because you're not going have this as a trial. you're going to have it as an ex-par tay kind of proceeding and i would rather have the administration on the hook for the whole thing. at this particular point you have to dial down your frequency. if you were looking at the al qaeda-type situation, you vanquished them, doing think

you'd want to have a change in general policy. i think you'd want to have a ramping back on the grounds you can't cross the hurdle. >> the idea of per pet wul war plays because it ends up being justification for a lot of things. >> and an excuse for some. the president talked about creating a legal structure. creating a lethal structure with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and my successor for some time to come. there's a remoteness to it to make it telling too somehow think it can without any mess on our hand solve the veking problems. that gets to the question what's the bar for actually doing this stuff. i want to talk about that and the concept of imminence and how important that is and then whether we are at a perpetual war. what does that mean for the way we operate, as citizens, as a

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all right. richard made this argument that i think is a really interesting one an has intu tivg appeal to people which is basically like when we're in this universe of making these decisions about essentially battlefield considerations or there's some training camp and are we going to strike it north that you just have to essentially do this kind of balancing act of interest and just like approach it with prudence and care and have some kind of process internal to the administration but you cannot, in his words, judicialize this. it can't be the sort of thing you run through the court for review and i want to hear your response to that. >> well, there are a number of contested assumptions. first we should talk about what the legal standards are, and the law is clear under international law, self-defense answers the question of when one state can violate the sovereignty of another state by using force in

their territory. it doesn't answer the question of whether the use of lethal force against a particular person is lawful. those answers come out of the context of armed conflict from law that says you can target people if they pose a specific concrete and imminent threat and that makes sense. you don't need judicial view when those conditions are met. there's armed conflict when someone is directly participa participating in the conflict. it completely confuses those standards. we seem to be accepting the conclusion that a person is someone who can be targeted and making policy conclusion that we want to be able to kill them and from that conclusion picking and choosing the different kinds of standards that might apply. >> i think one of the most disturbing aspects of this is we seem to have entered the age of precrime where people are patterns of life are studied. if you're a military aged mail in a certain region of yemen,

the white house is essentially asserting that these people are terroristed and that we can kill them, and to me that is -- that's an incredibly dangerous threshold to have crossed. i mean redefining imminent in the way that the white paper did where it may be possibly at some point in the future this person would pose a direct threat to the united states, that combined with the signature strikes is a disturbing aspect of that. >> could i comment? >> yes, please. >> i think the appropriate thing to do is to ask the question about this precrime stuff and the criminal law's more complicated on that. we not only have a law of murder, with very a law of aiding and abetling and conspiracy to commit murder and under these circumstances if they're engaged full-time conspiracy, it's certain they could be prosecute nard if we send out the call and say, come on home and be prosecuted.

they're going to flee at that point. they become outlaws. so i don't think you'd f want to say every man in yemen counts as a terrorism because he's in the wrong program. i receive one instant of abuse which is truly regred gretable if you're killing a 16-year-old kid. i think you have to look at the overall error rates taking into account both successes and famures. >> let me just follow up on that, which is that part of the problem here is i just -- it's very unclear what the error rate is, right? i mean all of this is shrouded in secrecy. what counts as error. jeremy referred to as the secrecy strike which is defining civilians in way that has a lot of latitude. if you get a military age man in a strike it's by definition not a civilian. we don't know the empirical matter. >> this white paper is recognizing apparently limitations that the administration thinks applies to citizens, right?

so that seems to be the citizen level. we have no idea what stan 2k5rds it is applying to noncitizens, and, of course, to our knowledge there are four citizens who have died under the targeted killing program to date. meanwhile there are approximately 4,000 people who have died. and what we have are assertion that the right people are being killed but in response to credible allegations that hundreds of civilians have died, silence. >> yeah. >> and i just want to -- i want to respond to something jeremy said earlier because i think this goes back to decides what frame worj are we operating under. if we're operating under a war construct and if there's a huge question on who qualifies and when that war ends, it's a debate that needs to end and i believe the administration add least hinted through a speech that was made back in november by the former general council to the department of defense it's a huge critical question, and in war, killing is permissible. this is not torture. torture's imper messable in

every situation. killing is permitted in war. and the question is what do we do in this new kind of conflict in a situation when we're talking about potentially killing -- >> not yet any. >> as lodge as you have the ability. nobody's in favor of this. >> wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. you can imagine, you know, an al qaeda cell that was in the wilds of utah holed up in a compound, right, in which the balancing test. the balancing interest is can you capture them and is there going to be undue harm? will it be too hard? you can malk a scenario in which the test that is laid out in the white paper leads do you the conclusion that under that balancing test you strike it. >> i think -- >> you want to attack the test. but before you start to say that these things are likely to happen, if you had a pramg like this going on -- >> i didn't say exactly.

>> even impropable. the key thing to do is not worry about imagining but worry about demonstrated illustrations of abuse and there have been some and then the question you ask is whether or not they've tried to take something. >> to quote john brennan -- i'm not a lawyer. >> i am. >> but brennan said i'm not a lawyer and then said everything we're doing is perfectly legal except when asked about torture. then he said i'm not lawyer. i want any lawyer at the table here and there are a few of them, tell me that signature strikes are perfectly league. the idea that you can say a particular region of a country is known to have terrorists though there's no indictments. >> i would reject that. >> that's what this administration has asserted. for years that's what we're talking about here. we're talking about precrime. and it's -- there are cases,

there are documented cases of missile strokes. drones are one part of it. ac one 30, cruise missiles. one person may or may not be involved in al qaeda. >> hold that thought. i'm going to take a quick break. we'll continue when we come back. change engineering in dubai, aluminum production in south africa, and the aerospace industry in the u.s.? at t. rowe price, we understand the connections of a complex, global economy. it's just one reason over 75% of our mutual funds beat their 10-year lipper average. t. rowe price. invest with confidence. request a prospectus or summary prospectus with investment information, risks, fees and expenses to read and consider carefully before investing. i'm here to pick up some cacti. it should be under stephens. the verizon share everything plan for small business. get a shareable pool of data... got enough joshua trees? ... on up to 25 devices.

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that's why there's new pam. five days later, i had a massive heart attack. bayer aspirin was the first thing the emts gave me. now, i'm on a bayer aspirin regimen. [ male announcer ] be sure to talk to your doctor before you begin an aspirin regimen. [ woman ] learn from my story. . just to get a sense of the numbers here. these are just drone strikes. we should be clear that drone strikes are part of the way that attacks happen. it could happen through missiles, jsoc strike teams. this is by country. 2004 through 2013. around 363 strikes. in yemen, between 42 and 52. in somalia, 10 to 23 and there are others in other parts of the world. reported civilian deaths, and this brings up the error rate. this is just our moral

intuitions as citizens. it seems absolutely unacceptable. like actually what the implementation looks like in terms of who is dying seems to me very important and we just don't have incredibly good numbers on this. but reported civilian deaths in pakistan, between 473 and 893. in yemen, between 72 and 178. somalia between 11 and 57. those are wide bans, but, again, this is a difficult thing to pip down. >> there's two types of error rates. one, are we getting the right targets, and, two, who are the casualties? >> right. we happen to get those we want to strike and then the wedding party who happens to be in the house next door. >> right.

>> it would appear to be language of limitations, imminence. as you read this white paper, you realize that those terms are redefined in such a way that they're vague, elastic, and void of their meaning. >> let me read the pork of -- >> it's a painful definition. >> let me read a portion of it. the threat imposed demands a broader context of imminence in judging when a person presents terror attacks. in this context, imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity, the possibility of reducing collateral damage to civilians, and the likelihood of heading off future attacks. thus a decision maker presents an imminent threat must take into account they're continually plotting attacks against the united states and basically say continually plotting of it

doesn't mean what we used to think of but this sort of broad sense in which you're just out there, right? >> the white paper expands on that and says it doesn't require clear evidence. remember, this is a high-level official. high-level official doesn't need to have clear ens of an actual plot that's about to take place and it could happen at any time in the future. now, we've defined a way what the standard is, but i think one of the critical things to realize is what this memo, the white paper and the memo its based on appear do is to allow the killing of citizens who don't truly pose an imminent threat and without judicial review either before the fact of after the fact. >> should we -- how much should we care as citizens? >> i don't think you should care. i mean the interesting thing is if you look at the major two guarantees with respect to this one on due process and one on habeas corpus, there's no

distinction between citizens and aliens. that's true with the ordinary criminal process. the key areas of distinction involve differentishes. right to buy and acquire property given to citizens and not to aliens, but if you want to punish somebody criminally or confiscate their property, it doesn't matter. >> you know, i agree. the substantive law is the same. it protects everyone the same. the reason we're talking about citizenship here is because it's clear that citizens have a right to the courthouse, they can get into the courtroom door where it's less clear with noncitizens. >> i think noncitizens have the right to do this as well. >> listen, i completely agree with you. unfortunately the courts haven't i mean it's their problem. they're wrong. >> but this does get back a little bit -- i don't mean to be repeating myself, but this getting back to the question are we in an armed conflict or are

we not because it's clear in an armed conflict, the united states does not have to -- when the united states bonmbs units n germany, they did not have to provide access to the courts for those individuals but here's where i think the imminence definition is really disturbing. imminence is used. it's used as a substantive cry tearial and it's used to water down the procedure analysis in terms of what rights are due. here we know, as you said at the beginning, we know that these decisions are made with great care, great deliberation, and a painstaking process. any situation where there is no imneminence of any sort and in such a system there is room to build in many more procedural guarantees both for citizens and noncitizens whether required by law or not. >> just because they say there's all this care being taken, i don't believe that.

this argument that's sort of emerging that you talked about that lou guy, i would probably be up in arms about this if a republican were doing it, it's like parkinson stockholm syndrome. i mean are these people serious? are they listening to their own words? you're saying this particular president, i want him to run the kill program but if they're republicans, i don't. you're willing to confront. >> nobody, i think, would disagree -- >> hold on one second. i want to talk about the big response to that like what's the alternative question, right? any time you critique the drone program, people end up saying what are you going do about alawky. i want to look at that question from the legal standpoint and policy standpoint when we come back. so now i can be in the scene. advair is clinically proven to help significantly improve

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so let's assume anwar al awlaki is what presumably

precipitated this. the white paper was written after he was kill. we hope they're writing the memos before the strikes are happening. let's say he's really operationally involved, actively in involved in yemen where he is doing things we know he is. we have the christmas day bomber. he's, you know, coordinating logistics for a strike on america, he does pose a threat. if the targeting killing is wrong and we shouldn't be doing it. it's not legal or strategically wise or moral, what's the option? >> i think the second prong is important. there needs to be a serious inquiry and feasiblelet of capture. again, i go back to the question if it's a armed conflict. i don't think there's if there's

evidence that he's engaged in ongoing attacks and capture is not feasible, i don't think it's as hard of a question. if that information is not accurate and we're talking about operating in a self-defense rubric, i think that there needs to be extremely high demanding standards for determining that there is an imminent threat. >> well, part of the problem is that all of those standards are going to be internal to the executive. >> that is pa rt of the problem and what we're assuming is partly what's contested. look. the government has made serious allegations against anwar al awlaki. there's a difference between allegations and evidence. it never charged him with a crime. throughout a long period of time. and the reason the courts exist are to distinguish between allegations and evidence. >> right. but in a war framework that's not the case. >> we're assuming it's war framework. >> the president is authorized

toual all necessary use in. planned, authorized, committed or aided in the terrorist attacks or har wobored in futur acts of terrorism against the united states by such nations, organizations or persons and it's cited in it. we're at war. >> well, that -- but that was written for the post 9/11 to ought rietz the war against afghanistan, right? >> no. it's much more general than that. >> the issue is we have undefined operational forces and al qaeda and those are hotly contested issues. we're saying and we've said against the government that at the time that an kwar al awlaki and the others were killed there was no around conflict in yemen and the government instead of saying here are all the reasons why they're saying we don't think the court should look at it -- >> just to be clear, the

government's law is to secure state's secrets. >> saying they have no role in assuming it's an armed conflict. >> i don't think you could possibly make the claim that there isn't an armed conflict going on given the kinds of threats that are involved. i mean it seems to me that the remarks you made at the outsit follows. nothing like that is going to happen. i mean -- or that we take diligent work yochl view to be extremely proactive. i do think that this is not a judicial question whether it is an armed conflict. there's a political question there. thing on that one, hina's wrong. i think it's ugly and we're entitled to take some defense. i don't think what we should do is tolerate it. i don't think we should smuggle it in here. it's a huge public check and i want to her to denounce him at every opportunity. >> there's not a public check in the sense that we don't know what's going on. >> i think that's the critical point.

there seems to be much, much grear transparency. there needs to be a much greater accounting of the legal criteria, the fact that it took so long for this white paper coonly out that lays out the purported legal justification for engaging in these types of strikes is unjustifiable and there needs to be a public debate and a debate with the international partners about what the laws are, which i think is highly contested but more importantly what the laws should be and the policy should be. >> which should bring us to the brennan nomination. here we're talking about tran parency and secrecy. this white paper came out which shows you how contested it is, that it's now becoming an issue for republicans and democrats alike. john brennan said he wants to optimize transparency and secrecy and that is hard to understand except what's happened here is we don't have all of the legal memos, the

republicans don't have the legal memos and senator ron wyden's words, we should know that authority. the summary for the argument is no substitute for the argument itself. >> right. and there's no way, that i think you could defend keeping the legal rationale secret. >> absolutely. >> i have a kind word for brennan, at least one. those are the wrongd words. what he should have said h very to balance the trade-off and ask the question is it going to hamper the effort to try to chase after people. that's a much more defensible people doing it. i'd rather attack him for what he should have said instead of what he did. >> i think it's a kabuki oversight. the follow-up was weak sauce. there was no follow-up on some of these core questions. we're talking about the most fundamental rights that we have in our society and i think that continuation should shoulder a lot of the blame for this and i'm sorry. you can't, you know, conduct

foreign policy declarations by league things to the media. that can't be your oversight. there has to be something. >> jennifer daskal from georgetown eun jerts and jeremy scahill and hina and jeremy epstein. >> we're joined by paul krugman on what he wants to hear in the president's state of the union address right after this. you h. your doctor will say get smart about your weight. i tried weight loss plans... but their shakes aren't always made for people with diabetes. that's why there's glucerna hunger smart shakes. they have carb steady, with carbs that digest slowly to help minimize blood sugar spikes. and they have six grams of sugars. with fifteen grams of protein to help manage hunger... look who's getting smart about her weight. [ male announcer ] glucerna hunger smart. a smart way to help manage hunger and diabetes.

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this week ahead of the president's state of the union address on tuesday the white house began laying the groundwork for yet another deal to stave off the looming spending. it's scheduled to take effect in march unless congress can agree on a broader deficit reduction package. president obama says if congress fails to agree on such a package as seems likely he wants to delay the cuts to give lawmakers

even more time to hand route a deal. >> if congress can't act immediately on a bigger package, if they can't get a bigger package done by the time the sequester is scheduled to go into effect, then i believe that they should at least pass a smaller package of spending cuts and tax reforms that would delay the economically damaging effecting on f the sequester for a few more months until congress finds a way to replace these cuts with a smarter solution. >> on the same day the president spoke, the congressional budget office confirmed what a vast body of empirical evidence has already told us. austerity has been a considerabn economic growth. quote, gdp will grow slowly in 2013 because of fiscal tightening.

without that it would probably improve by 1.5%. economic output will remain lower until 2017 making a full decade of lost economic growth from a financial crash. so with the sequester looming we find ourselves in a critical moment and as you follow the various political developments, you'll notice one voice is likely to stand out among the rest. paul krugman. there is perhaps no other figure more influential. his book out in paperbook "end this depression now!" . it's my pleasure to have paul krugman with me. thanks for coming in. what do you want to hear in the state of the union on tuesday? >> what i'd like to hear is not what i'm going to hear. mostly i hope it's not what i'm going to hear. this whole business with

sequester, this is not the time for any of this and the less he says about it, the better. i was really gratified because he said almost nothing about the deficit. he finally broke out of that, so if he talks about other things, you know, the middle class, in equality, climate, and not about we need to balance the bunt that's what i'm mostly hoping for. >> it's funny you say that. one of things that's interesting in reading your columbia, at one level you're as inside as it gets. you won the nobel prize, you're an extremely highly respected economist, you're on the new york times page. you're not some scrappy outsider and yet your posture is very much as an outsider and you're very critical of the very serious people or the beltway and i just wonder like dwlou -- do you think about your relationship to what is the inside and yourself on the outside and how you kind of preserve that distance?

>> part of is preserving it literally. i'm not in dc. you know, i'm mostly working in central new jersey, right? so not being part of that circuit. but it's also coming at it from, you know -- i'm still at some level a professor who's moon lightning this opinion business. it's one of people who hang out together, who talk to each other, who don't listen. you know, what's odd about my position on this stuff is i am for the most part not doing any kind of odd unorthodox noejices. that is not what people in dc hear. it's not just that they don't except it. for the most parnlt they haven't heard about it. maybe the budget deficit is not a problem. it's barely in the washington discourse and because i'm still in touch, i'm really sort of out of it. >> why is there that distance? this is something that i think that's interesting is that, you

know, people that are like -- like yourself that are making the case for a kind of mackerel economics, keynesian 101, have been relative to it and then it become this political question ultimately, right? the kind of policy question is fairly clear, at least from where you stand and from where i stand, so why is there the gap between mackerel economics 101 and what policy makers talk about? >> i think there are two things going on. one of which -- both of which are odd and disturbing. one is sort of grand and one is sort of petty. in some ways the petty may be more important. the grand thing is washington has been dominated for 30 years by a right-wing establishment whose goal is very much to cut back on -- you know, roll back the great society. roll back social security, medicare, medicaid, and from their point of view this crisis

is an opportunity. they see big deficits. this is an opportunity to real against deficits and of course what you must do is cut social security benefits for some reason to deal with the current deficit and so that's a big part of it. and that influences the debate. the other thing is there are a lot of people in d.c. who posture, whose persona is that of being serious and you show that by being lling to impose suffering and cuts. the serious thing to do right now to spend is very, very. so they don't -- i think they just find it hard to even wrap their minds around the notion that the opposite of what they usually call for is what you need to do right now. >> and i think that's particularly true in the case after financial crises. in your earlier book you talk about the idea that there's a sense -- deep intuitive moral sense in which people feel you need to pay penance, right?

>> right. >> if there's been crisis, there's been sin, and the only way to get oust sin is penance, and you have a great argument about that in your book. i want to talk about that. i also want to talk about your role in the public debate right after we come back. step seven point two one two. verify and lock. command is locked. five seconds. three, two, one. standing by for capture. the most innovative software on the planet... dragon is captured. is connecting today's leading companies to places beyond it. siemens. answers. but they have to use special care in keeping the denture clean. dentures are very different to real teeth. they're about 10 times softer and may have surface pores where bacteria can multiply. polident is designed to clean dentures daily. its unique micro-clean formula kills 99.99% of odor causing bacteria

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we've got a personal passion to help your business run safer, smarter, and sharper. we are tyco integrated security. and we are sharper. good morning from new york. i'm chris hays here with paul krugman. we talked about after crisis there's a need for penance. >> of course it's usually the result of excesses by some people but then the notion is we must all sacrifice which isn't actually right. i messaged how i didn't like obama's first inaugural. he had that boiler plait about

shared sacrifice and when you're experiencing a depression, you don't need shared sacrifice. you need spending to get the economy moving. and, sure, you can see how wrong it is if you think about this. family which has overspent needs to tighten its belt, but it doesn't as part of its belt tightening start by having one of the spouses quit his or her job. but when do you that in the economy it leads to mass unemployment. which is crazy. >> bank of england did a study recently that our segment producer found that i think is so fascinating. it talks about the -- it looked at all the countries in the world and it's valuated the percent of country years spent in banking crises, and from 1950 to 19790.9% of total country years are set in banking crises and from 1980 to 2010 almost 20% of total country years in the countries analyzed are spent in banking crisis. what is going on?

>> it's actually not much of a mystery. it's liberalization. we had from 1950 to 1980 osh actually from 1935 to 1980 roughly, we had a very tightly controlled banking system in just about every country because the great depression was right there in people's memories. great bank runs. we had strong constraints on international movement of capital, so in many ways it was an inefficient system. it was hard to get a loan. but it was a safe system. and then we said, well, you know, we've learned to manage these things, let's open this up and since 1980 it's been one crisis after another. latin american debt crisis, savings and loan crisis, asian crisis and the big kahuna which is the crisis we're still dealing with. >> is there a way of conceiving of a solution to that that is not just going back to what we had during the new deal, or is that the solution? like is there some way to combine the insights of the policy revolutions of what

happens to liberal lichl to create some sort of third phase that gets the most of them or the things we get in in the new deal we need to relearn? >> we did things that weren't necessary. we probably had too much. the regulation cue that limited the interest on savings accounts was probably too restrictive. you know -- and in some ways you can't go back. we're never going to go back as a bank is a big world of market tellers. the world is just too complicated. but a lot of people looked like -- this is my home field. international capital movement. and where's the sign that free movement of international capital is productionive anywhere? there is no evidence. people have looked and looked. >> in fact, some of the countries with the tightest capital controls are the ones that are the success stories, right? >> that's right. it's a tiny country like iceland that's come out in part.

they broke the rules and imposed temporary restrictions on capital. that's what do you. in this case it's rioting bankers, so you need to stop them. >> i want to read you a quote. you're tacking about your influences. i thought it was interesting. you said those who hold the position have a lot more. does anyone doubt the white house pays attention to what i write? my question to you is i think that's so interesting. do you know how to use it's affectively? >> by the way, that was in response to debunking the people who said, you should be a treasury secretary. >> you were explaining why you would not want to be treasury secretary. >> the terms of getting your ideas into the debate, i do well. people do read. i do talk about it. do i manage to influence policy? that's a harder question. but does anybody is always the question. no. look. it's a responsibility. you've got 800 words and the most valuable real estate in the plan echlt you'd better at least

catch people's attention with it and i think i do manage do that. >> we're going to have this sequester debate and we're going to talk to the panel about that. here's what ends up happening, particularly in the era of the financial crisis. economic issues have been front and center and often economic issues that are fairly technical or if not technical, what ends up happening it seems to me is people on different parts of the spectrum all have their proxies, right? all the liberals read you and i'll even hear them sicite you. greg mankiw or someone else. my question is how should citizens who are not economists go about trying to adjudicate these disputes that's one beat more sophisticated than just reading the person on your team? >> yeah. that's a -- that's a hard issue. i mean, in fact, what do i do on

issues that are -- i don't know the technical stuff. i look for style. i look for people who seem to be actually looking at evidence. i look for people who've been willing on occasion to admit they made a mistake in the past. look for some sign that a person is actually studying as opposed to just spouting a public line. but, you know, i've talked about this. it's -- there's this issue that came up from the madoff scandal of affinity fraud where people believe somebody who seems like their kind of guy and there's a lot of that going on. people who listen to sources who are, you know -- if you actually believe what you read on the editorial page you would have lost a lost money over the years but people believe that because they seem like their kind of people. >> you talk about the willingness to admit their mistakes? what are the big things you where wrong of in the last ten years? >> the biggest was i was expecting a deficit in around 2003 because the bush

administration, not that they were just running deficit bus they were clearly so long-term irresponsible. pushing through long term tax cuts and i thought, gosh, the financial market will punish us for that. i made two mistakes which are now clear to me. one is the united states gets a lot of slack. we're just not treated the way argentina gets treated. >> and you had spent a lot of time. >> right. and the other is we're a country that borrows in our own kcurre y currency. i revised my views. the united states is a lot more robust and that sort of thing. but i was wrong. i was sounding an alarm that turned out to be wrong circa 2003. >> do you take it to the next logical conclusion? there's a group of theory rifts who call themselves monetary theorists and we had one of them on the program and i follow a

lot thoof their work that basically deficits if you're borrowing in your own currency don't matter at all, right? >> there are times that it's not like this. not now, but there are times when its and what the mft guys, they -- we have no disagreement about what happens now. but they think it's always the way it is now. i become a lot more orthodox when the economy is in full employment. >> do you consider yourself an orthodox economist? >> what i do is manage to sound radical and provocative going from chapter 14 of a macroeconomics textbook. >> does that say something about the way economics -- i mean what is your judgment of how the economics field has performed in the last ten years? you've been very harsh on the beltway press.

your own. >> we've been terrible on that. a lot of the field, instead of talking, you know, you want authority. you want somebody to adjudicate. >> read the blog. i actually lay out the case. this is not just the a-team liberal. i have been on the other side of things in these circumstances. but the economic professions just generally. and people threw away a lot of knowledge. it was shocking in 2009 how many people didn't know -- you know, they were reinventing 1930s vintage fallacies thinking it was fresh think because they didn't know the history of their own profession. >> i want to talk to you about one of the great mysteries of this recovery, which is this divergence between profits and wages, the continuing soaring

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all right. here with paul krugman. there's two feature of recovery that i think are vexing and particularly difficult to work out why they're happening. one is this cash hoarding. you have march 2002 both corporate cash flow and investments were about $700 billion each. by march 2012 it was at 1.2 trillion. capital investments were around $1 trillion and overall have about 1.9 trillion dollars sitting on their balance sheet. apple has had this bizarre kind of like crisis of having too much cash where their shareholders are telling them you have all this cash, what is the deal? we don't even know how to price this over a certain window of

time. why is there so much money sitting on the sideline? >> okay. so we don't actually know the answer. one thing that is striking is if you think that it's because companies are refusing to invest, that doesn't really f the facts. business investment, corporate investment, it's not as strong as its was at the peek of the last boom or as strong as it was in the clinton years. corporate investing. if they're earning vast amounts of profits and they don't seem to want to invest it is that probably because demand isn't out there, but also they just seem to be sitting on the stuff and it is -- but, you know, it's kind of a -- you know, back in terrell years of the last decade, ben bernanke gave a widely cited speech about the global savings rut, but the point is right. there is a global savings glut and a lot of it is corporations are savings.

it's a lot of retained earnings just sitting there. not quite sure why except that maybe they're making so much money they don't know what to do with it. >> that brings us to this corporate profits mystery. employee compensation fell to a low of 43.5% of gdp in 2012. and this is one of the stories of recovery that i think is probably the most worrisome. you know, we have, unlike europe we have reachieved growth. we're in a recovery. but there's this tremendous yawning kasim opening up. in a consumption based economy it comes from selling things to people and if people don't have money from wages and they don't have money from huge amounts of debt, where's that money and why are we profiting it so far? >> it's interesting. i mean there's a point of view.

some economists will tell you, well, the corporations are a veil. this does look like it's a big source of a sinkhole for purchasing power. corporations are accumulating. the profit story is relatively new. we've happened soaring inequality since 1980 but until the year 2000 it was all about earnings. it was among people who were one way or the other collecting a paycheck since 2000. it's been a redistribution of a labor of all kinds. dwoejts quite know what that's about. it might be technology. increased monopoly power, some combination of the two, but it certainly has become -- it's almost as big a deal as the great depression itself and it transforms everything but not in a good way. >> how do we think what to do about it? >> one answer is a lot of what

the business interests are campaigning for, let's cut corporate taxes. cut corporate taxes. actually maybe not. maybe we should be raising them again because this is a big source of our problems. we need to start thinking about paying programs. a little bit of obama care is, in fact, paid for on special taxes on investment income but we're going to need to do more of that. but we might think if this is market power how about revitalizing anti-trust enforcement. that went away in the 1980s and that was probably a big mistake that we're paying for now. >> i want to talk about the sequester and discovery and bring in other folks to discuss it with you and we'll be back right after this. [ female announcer ] he could be your soulmate. but first you've got to get him to say, "hello."

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jo joining me now heather mcghee, steve, author of "the end of loser liberalism." and alexis goldstein, former vice president of information technology now a wall street occupy activist. i want to start at the table. that's the big defining story in washington. it's unclear how much mention it's going to get. it's going to be the next big self-imposed crisis here. and i was on the lawrence o'donnell show with alex wagner hosting and governor alex dean was making the case we should have gone over the fiscal cliff. his basic argument is it's so hard to bring the defense budget to heal ever that this is this one-shot opportunity.

here's a look at how the projected spending according to the congressional budget office looks. social security will rise from 5% to 5 president 5% of gdp. defense did correctionary spend willing fall to 2.8% gdp. so this is the best -- that chart, i think, is the best progressive case to let that sequester happen and i'm curious what you think. >> chris, i think we should point out you're talking about a decade. we have another life in 2014, new congress, new president. we're talking about what happens in march. look. i'd love to see it not go into place for the simple reason that's going to slow growth and throw more people out of work. i don't think that's funny. i'd love to see that not go into effect. that doesn't mean we see the next ten years of cuts.

>> first of all, it would be nice to have a plan. people talk about waste, fraug, an and abuse. to have plan to deal with that if we ever can is not the same thing as saying let's slash it. you know, we're right in the middle of a depressed economy. 2023 is going to be president santorum's second term. >> i think it's important to look at the projections just to see only how much the debate, particularly among the democrats and the president has fallen completely into the box of conservative economic orthodoxy. you're looking at place that 20 years out we're going to be spending more on debt payments than we are nondiscretionary. we're going to look where it's 2 president 8% of gdp, 2.6% if the sequester goies into effect.

right now we're spend 1g% on veterans, 1% on poverty and education. i think about things that need to happen, universal child care. free college. that's another percentage of gdp. really we're in a box -- >> get all to 100 percent, heather, keep going. >> seriously, i don't know anyone who says that 10 and 20 years out the working and middle class are going to need less from the federal government than they do now. >> and i think thing i worry about now is what you mentioned at the very beginning of this is that this is a self-imposed crisis and the only way we can tackle defense spending is through a self-imposed crisis. we're playing into this scenario of shock. what really worries me about this is jack lew and how obama is positioning jack lew to sorts of -- it's almost like an admission that we're going to keep having this problem so we need a budget guy, but what does that mean for financial reform?

are we going to leave to the deputy which we heard two suggestions which are not good, a former ceo of morgan stanley and someone from the walmart foundation? that doesn't make someone like me feel very good. >> and i think the theme of per pertual crisis which has been the enduring theme since the mid-term election 2010 and the debacle. i saw timothy geithner speak a few years ago where he said we've got to find some way to bind future policy makers, right? he was talking about this. this has been this sort of weird project that everyone in washington has been into which is binding future verngss of themselves and then becoming the future version and then taking off the binding and then coming up with some new idea to bind the future version of themselves and i want to ask the question of can you legislate across time in any meaningful sense or should they just stop trying to do that? i want to hear your thoughts on that right after this break. [ babies crying ] surprise -- your house was built on an ancient burial ground.

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. all right. so should legislators give up on this project they're in? >> i think what it represents, chris, is this fundamental fear of the future and fear of democracy. both things i think are pretty great actually. you've got the deficit redulkds imperative is really a preoccupation of the donor class. the wealthy are twice as likely to want to cut spending than the general public. we talk about icht if we're really at a point where there needs to be a whole new new deal but we're still responsive to the tale party moment of 2010. >> right. the sequester -- the budget control act has been kicked down

the road enough that we're still trying to jump over it. >> there's still a case. there's something to be sads for signaling well in advance if you're going to be changing things, if you're going to be changing the social security retirement age you may want to let people know that in advance. that's a weaker argument than the way it's presented in washington. we have to kilometer mitt ourselves to cutting future benefits which is a complete nonsense argument. it's really -- by and large it's turning into a bad thing because we're impairing the current government. >> the other part of the story that's just basically false is we've had this long history of out of control spending. you just go where? you know, domestic discretionary pretty much is the share of the

gdp. we deliberately raised that. that's because the economy collapsed. you know, it went in the right direction. but, you know, apart from -- we're getting older so social security will cost more. we knew that for 40 years. allen simpson discovered it when he was on the simpson-bowles commission. the other part is health care. you know, we're saying, one of the stories that hasn't gotten enough, they lowered their budget because they're a presuming they're going to see that. >> we're all being moved to the right because of this donor class, because of the interest of the wealthy, and everyone else is being told we have to starve the beast of the government and we have to cut social programs and it's austerity forever and it seems to be what we see. >> partly that's because, you know, it is this chicken and egg question about austerity, right?

i don't think -- voters don't want it though some will say they want it, right? there's this way they talk about the deficit and it becomes a signifier for delocalized. i worry about the economy and deficit. those sort of run together. but we are -- what's remarkable to me is we're undergoing a lot of fiscal tightening because it got done in these little sequential ways, so here's fiscal tightening across the world from the institute. from least to most, russia has been -- has been implementing paul kruge man's plan. the united states has actually undergone a significant amount of austerity, right? >> this was just for 2013. >> this is projected for just this year. >> but if you look back, basically we started tightening at the beginning of 2010 and it's been significant. if you look at purchases of goods and services, actually government buying, it's back

down to 2007 levels in the united states right now. it's sort of crept up on us. by the way, that's a demonstration. if you're worried about out of control spending, there was all this, the stimulus will never be undone. once you start spending, it never goes away. it went away with a vengeance. >> i think what we're not talking about in interprets of the political valance is this. there's this great 1984 quote where he talks about how there were sort of three phases to the southern strategy. first is opposition to the voting rights act. second is opposition to integration and forced bussing. and then he starting talking about how at the time -- this is '84 ronald reagan's brand would be the fiscal southern strategy because for many people, the idea of cutting government spending means cutting service, cutting investment, cutting the public to a public that does not

look like me. the eye of the -- look like the person being targeted with this speech. so it's this great thing where you talk about being moved from forced bussing to cutting taxes and spending but you're still talking about race. >> and the great cruelty of that is in the wake of financial crisis, we've seen minority households hit the worst. hispanic households lost 60% of their wealth and black households lost 53%. >> i would focus much more on unemployment. i know the study well. i got really pissed at them. the reality is the kidnap cal african-american household didn't very any before the crisis. what matters much more is the -- >> you have people who own their homes outright. >> i think the unemployment rate matters much more for the african-americans than the loss of wealth. >> it's not just this. i looked back in the 1930s. in 1936 the american public p l

polling showed they wanted deficit reduction. >> and they got it in '37. >> and it was a political disaster. so part of this is that politicians need to understand that governing by polls is actually a big mistake on economic policy because it has consequences and even in political terms that can matter much more. >> and i will also say they walk up to cutting medicare but they never actually do it, right? the only cuts have been on the payment side but the republicans want nothing more than to goad democrats. >> president obama was good at that. >> i want to talk about the role inequality is playing in the recovery. we had joseph here last week. we'll play that when we get right back. my doctor told me calcium is efficiently absorbed in small continuous amounts. citracal slow release

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if your tires need to be rotated, you have to get that done as well. jackie, tell me why somebody should bring they're car here to the ford dealership for service instead of any one of those other places out there. they are going to take care of my car because this is where it came from. price is right no problem, they make you feel like you're a family. get a synthetic blend oil change, tire rotation and much more, $29.95 after $10.00 rebate. if you take care of your car your car will take care of you. what sustains in particular the american economy, people on the top spend smaller fraction than those at the bottom. so when you move money from the

bottom to the mid toll the taupe overall spending gets constrained. with that kunld of recovery, not is surprise. people invest when there's a return, and if there's no return, if there's know demand if you can't sell your groups. >> that was another nobel laureate. we've been racking them up recently. making a case about how inequality is standing in the way of recoverry. all the liberals were -- >> i realize afterward the title of the blog should have been "i'll do anything for joe, but i won't do that." it's not a terrible thing. my argument is two things.

one is that at any given point in time richer people save more than poor people. people who are rich are temporarily rich. in time we have gotten richer as kahntry but savings rates have not gone up. right now savings rates are higher but they're actually still low by historical standards. i just have -- i have a hard time making that the story. the corporate -- the corporate profits thing is the story. the money is disappearing into a sinkhole. yeah. dean has been arguing that excess saving is not our problem and i was sort of picking up from him. >> actually i take a different position. i think stick lits was onto something. we did see the reintroduce. you dead did see a rise in

profit sharing. paul is absolutely right. my argument is we had a different regime, that what we had was the fed lowered interest rates. they felt comfortable lowering interest rates. he wasn't wired. he said this many, many times some of what they did, the way it ended up boosting the economy is boost asset prices we had the stock bubble in the '90s, housing bubble in the last decade. that led to this wealth effect on consumption. we did see the consumption and low savings rate and lower at the peak of the housing bubble but that was driven by the bubbles. i don't want to put words in joe's mouth. i don't know if that's what stiglitz had in mind but i tlink's a story there. >> it's been sort of a weird continue yags and discontinuity with those trends which is we have inequalities there, record profits. we don't have any replacing asset bubble, right? there's nothing like the tech boom and there's nothing like housing and so this is now kind

of what -- increasingly this is what recovery or the normal is in the absence of the kind of injection of an asset bubble we had in the past. >> i do thing it's important to remember sometimes inequality comes out of policy decisions and i don't think we can let the administration off the hook. the best way to summarize it. the technicals are, listen, we were really easy on the banks and then we took it. instead what we did is we slowed them and it was another give away to the banks and it was another way to make sure that they could get back up on their feet but then they doend lend out to the american public. i think that's going to be a big part of the legacy. >> this is one thing that obama bobbled or geithner bobbled on their own. the mortgage relief program was a total bust. the money was there. they just didn't use it because they were so afraid that someone

would accuse them of having benefitted some undeserved people and those people, right? undeserving people that happened to be not white that they didn't do much mortgage relief. >> the question is -- i talked about hem a ton. but the question is there a causal link between that aspect of the recovery and the shape of the distribution of the recovery now, right? which is to say is it the case that because hamp was handled the way it was and assisting them in the deleveraging and banks did get assisted you can draw a direct cause. >> i think it's very hard to say. suppose we let the market run the course? let's imagine we had the free market fundamentals out there. citigroup is out of business, morgan stanley is out of business. i don't know if we would have had the tidal wave of bringing

down everything. most people would have a lot less money but what does it look like. part of the story here we should be jumping up and down. of course, paul is. we have all these people unemployed. the first stimulus passed was t and bush was in the white house. if we had let the dominos fall we'd be in a different world and the people in power and money would be less happy. >> one authentic that's very clear is that this rising inequality changes the political equality. i think it's okay because nobody they know is hurting, right? >> there's distance. >> right. it's remarkable how in some ways the story of the recovery keeps being jobs, jobs, jobs, is a problem, huge amount of joblessness, declining wage, flat lining personal income, and then washington conversations drifting way from it and strong be wrenched back and then

drifting away and then having to be wrenched back. >> that's what happen whence you have a campaign finance regime where you can dollar for dollar translate that. >> what you should know for the news week ahead coming up next. [ bop ] [ bop ] you can do that all you want, i don't like v8 juice. [ male announcer ] how about v8 v-fusion. a full serving of vegetables, a full serving of fruit. but what you taste is the fruit. so even you... could've had a v8.

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a quick update on the story we redid last sunday. when i talked to a number of politicians and members of congress to pressure and in some case skplisicily threaten brooklyn college into canceling or co-sponsoring an event that would feature two speakers. tablet magazine criticized my initial commentary on the movement. any broad movement can be hard to comprehensively characterize but it is true that the two speakers who appeared ale at

brooklyn college. instead call for a single state on the entirety of the land between the river jordan and the mediterranean. such a state would recommend the demise as a vision by theodore her shall. and it is for that reason that they are viewed as toxic by those committed to israel survive as an explicit lig jewish state. the day after i called on them to stop it. they echo by opponents and threats by at least ten city council members to cut financing for the college. such intimidation chills debate and makes a mockery of it. same day gould issued and refused to order the cancellation of the event or the revocation of the political science department's sponsorship. then new york city council

assistant fiddler wrote a letter to gould that basically threatened to cut the public whf our city, many who feel targeted want their tax money to be spent on. it alienated them and mayor bloomberg denounced the threat. >> you want to go to a university from the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, i suggest you apply to a school in north korea. >> strong words. thursday night, the event took place thursday night. score one for academic freedom. what you should know for the week coming up, in the wake of the tragic suicide of aaron schwartz, they are going to push to reform the law under which he was prosecuted before his death. the sweeping computer fraud and

abuse act in 1986 that lets government prosecute routine non-criminal behavior. other politicians supported the law. the department of justice hasn't come down one way or the other. the chairman, bob, offered no word on whether the committee will consider it. nothing will change without sustained pressure. the new york city police department is being sued by civil rights lawyers over the practice of widespread and intense surveillance of muslims. the demographics unit infiltrated muslim groups in the area including organized outdoor trips and student events. they claim in the practice of infiltration violates the rules they agreed to in a settlement that grew out of antiwar activists.

you should know the so-called guidelines prohibit organizations unless there's specific information connecting them to a past or present crime. in spite of the violation, the program will continue. want to find out what my guests think we should know for the week coming up. heather? >> the president's state of the union obviously the austerity lobby to make sure he continues on the path to national decline. as fix the debt, which is one of the corporate front groups for austerity does a big press conference, you should know that 22 of the companies spent more on lobbying than in paying taxes. >> it's a good thing to know. there's interesting reporting of how they have played this key role in moving the conversation to austerity. something that we have been talking about a lot. >> part of the peterson machine.

>> it counts for the explanatory gap between what voters talk about and what they say they care about. >> they have been a valuable public service. it's right in front of us. a couple points. you are talking aaron schwartz. it's worth noting. i consider him a friend. he was facing decades in prison for trying to download academic articles. you can say the justice department was prepared to pursue the case. not a single banker has gone to jail or faced criminal prosecution for tens of billions of dollars of fraudulent loans. it's a striking contrast. heather picked up on my ideas. the union address, where is president obama coming down? i mean a lot of people were happy with the inaugural address. what was striking to me and

painful. he didn't say a word ant jobs. the question is how front and center are jobs as opposed to the deficit? i think we have a big indication of where he's going. >> i think it's not all doom and gloom. power of recovery is happening. two worker owned co-ops, one is occupy. >> it's a tongue twister. there's another one that people should know about the working world. it's a vc model, but a social aim, not a profit aim. they see the worker owned co-ops. when they make money, they pay back their initial investment and use the money to seat another. they work in argentina and nicaragua. >> that's super cool. >> republicans are trying to present an alternative vision and failing.

it's dramatic. i was fascinated by eric cantor last week. the format was exactly that of a state of the union. this is a republican state of the union. supposed to be new ideas. there were no new ideas. he called for an end to all federal finances of social science research. the really important thing is to make sure we don't know anything about what works. >> it's remarkable. this is something i think we want to cover. it's a hidden story of this austerity of what's been done to research. it's broader than the austerity over a long period of time. i have family members and friends engaged in medical research. an uncle who is an amazie inini urologist. it's harder to get money for basic research. research is a tiny portion of what the government spends but a

huge return. >> the private sector as well. >> in terms of research and knowledge, i was listening to the discussion how should people distinguish. he didn't give the best answer. much of what we are arguing over are clear predictions. we are supposed to see interest rates go through the roof. >> we are not seeing it. >> we should be thriving. down the line, i think paul's been right and the conservatives wrong. i want to thank heather, alexis from occupy wall street. thank you all. thank you for joining us. we'll be back saturday and sunday. coming up next, melissa harris-perry. a preview of the president's big speech. do words matter? plus, dissecting the troubling music between chris brown and

rye rye. see you next week here on "up." at 1:45, the aflac duck was brought in with multiple lacerations to the wing and a fractured beak. surgery was successful, but he will be in a cast until it is fully healed, possibly several months. so, if the duck isn't able to work, how will he pay for his living expenses? aflac. like his rent and car payments? aflac.

what about gas and groceries? aflac. cell phone? aflac, but i doubt he'll be using his phone for quite a while cause like i said, he has a fractured beak. [ male announcer ] send the aflac duck a get-well card at getwellduck.com.

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